An Empirical Research On The Topic-Chain In Chinese-English Interpreting

Today's world witnesses unprecedented frequent exchanges between different cultures,and interpreting,as an immediate translational activity,has been given much attention.Student interpreters,usually,find out that they have difficulties in figuring out the topic,which can possibly lead to interpreting staggering,including pauses,hesitations,repetition and correction,in the output.Therefore,the thesis starts with the differences between Chinese(a topic-prominent language),and English(a subject-prominent language),and between the topic and the subject.Taking these differences into account,an experiment was designed to examine how a correct or wrong understanding of topics in the source text has a bearing on quality of interpreting,especially the fluency in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting.The experiment invited 30 students majoring in Interpreting and Translation and their performances were recorded and analyzed.The results revealed that a full understanding of the topic was of help to improve both quality and fluency of interpreting to a certain degree.However,a correct understanding might also result in verbal disfluency and a wrong understanding of the topic might not necessarily cause an increase in verbal disfluency,but the discourse fluency was interrupted.